#Humansof: language, identities, and multimodal narratives in the digital society

Abstract

In the current paper, we discuss inter-relations amongst identities and narratives in the digital society. Assuming a dialogic and sociohistorical perspective to languages and culture (Bakhtin, 1986; 1993), we present selected findings from a digital ethnographic investigation (Pink et al, 2016) that aimed to map the cyberspace in search of narratives connected to the criterion “#humansof”. Objectively, we exam excerpts of two social profiles, “Humans of Curitiba” and “Humans of Ghana”. Drawing our interpretations from the concept of narrative identity (Ricoeur, 1991), our analysis suggests that both profiles employ transmedia narrative (Jenkins, 2011) and multimodality to build up online stories about local communities/people that are geographically, socially, and culturally distant and distinct. Meanwhile, they adopt the expression “humans of” to establish dialogic relations to actively respond to the (original) photographic project “Humans of New York”, thus mobilizing discursive interactions in which subjectivities emerge. We hope this work might contribute to current discussions performed in the educational field, especially those dedicated to contemporary perspectives of Literacies and to the dialogical interfaces established between “the writing society and the digital society”, as Monte Mór (2017) suggests.